Internet content providers can earn revenue by publishing ads on their website. When an advertisement is selected by a user browsing the website, the user's browser issues an http request for the linked ad document. Data embedded in the user's http request identifies the referrer of the ad URL, i.e., the content provider site publishing the ad. The publisher may earn revenue when users click the ads published on their site. For instance, if a user surfing the www.cnn.com website selects an ad for a new car, the user's browser might request the linked new car document from a server, and the ad server might determine that the ad request was referred by www.cnn.com.
Some advertisers do not want their ads to be displayed on sites with offensive content, such as sexually explicit sites. Thus, before publishing ads, sites typically must first obtain approval from the owner of the ad content. Owners such as ad licensors sometimes inspect the content provided at the domain before granting a license or other permission.
Enforcing licenses and verifying referrer fields can be difficult and costly. First, it is very difficult to determine whether a potential ad publisher actually has control over an asserted domain. Publicly available information about site ownership is basically limited to “whois” data available from Network Solutions™ and other registrars (e.g., the website www.whois.sc), which can be highly unreliable. For instance, the owner of a domain is frequently listed as “John Doe” with an address of “123 Test Street.” Thus, when an entity requests to publish content on a specific website, it is difficult or impossible for the content licensor to verify whether the entity actually has control over that website or whether the entity has instead made a fraudulent request. Second, it is difficult to verify that users of licensed web content such as ads are using the content in accordance with the license or other policies.
Furthermore, because refer fields are self-reported, they are unreliable. The refer field of an http request is sometimes modified (e.g., due to a proxy dropping a refer field, other error, or malfeasance) to appear as though a user's clicks were originating from a page that does not actually publish the ads. The refer field of an ad request may falsely identify a website that did not actually publish the ad. This falsehood is difficult to detect without actually visiting the identified referrer website to verify publication of the ad. Because of the large number of sites and their frequently changing content, manually verifying that potential and current ad publishers consistently conform to specific compliance criteria would involve significant administrative and labor costs.
These and other drawbacks exist with current systems and methods.